Lighting your Commercial Property – The Basics

| November 6, 2015

Lighting your Commercial Property – The Basics

When you’re running a shop or a store, the aesthetics of the property play a vital role in attracting the customer’s eye. It’s an important, but easily ignored aspect of your business. You’ll pay a large amount of attention to the general décor and aesthetics of your store, but not enough to the lighting.

Lighting is important, you want your customer to be able to see a product clearly and still be comfortable when they’re browsing your store. Here some facts that you need to know about lighting.

Types of Lighting

You might have heard of different kinds of bulbs and switches, but people outside the general design community usually haven’t heard of different kinds of lighting. These methods of lighting have different purposes.

  • Ambient Lighting – This form of lighting is the general purpose lighting, the one you see in all the stores that lights the entire area. These are usually the primary sources of light. They help maintain a general brightness in your store and make sure that there are no dark corners or patches.
  • Task Lighting – This lighting is focused on a particular area. These are usually placed in high-traffic areas where extra lighting is necessary. These areas include; checkout counters, cash counters, store entrance, rest rooms and dressing rooms, customer service desks, etc.
  • Accent Lighting – These might just be some of the most important lights in your store. For example, if you operate a jewelry store, you need to use accent lighting to accent the jewelry display, to make sure that the piece of jewelry is clearly highlighted and your customer can see the details of the jewelry clearly. This is accent lighting and it’s vital for almost all businesses.
  • Decorative Lights – This form of lighting is great to add a little more style to your store. They add beauty and interest to your to store. This is important because these lights add individuality to your business. You want to stand out amongst the competition and this can help.

These are the different types of lighting techniques that would come together to create a great ambiance for your store. All these types are essential aspects of one whole.

Bulbs

It’s vital to choose the kind of lights that would make sure that your store is well-lit but save energy as well. There are four primary types of bulbs available in the market. They are as follows:

  • Incandescent light bulbs are the most affordable of the lot. But they don’t offer great energy savings and aren’t durable.
  • Halogen lights are similar to incandescent lights and they are great as focused lighting. They’re not as energy efficient as LED or fluorescents but they’re a good choice for some areas.
  • Fluorescents are good at energy savings, more affordable than LED, and provide good light. They’re good for general or ambient lighting needs.
  • LED is a still developing technology but it offers great energy savings. However, it’s expensive.

You can ask a professional for some advice on the matter of commercial lighting. You’ll find several on the Hotfrog US’ Lighting page.